Cantatas

There are still unknown, exciting sides to Denmark's world-famous composer, Carl Nielsen (1865-1931). On this CD you can hear the premiere recordings of two of his cantatas for choir, soloists and orchestra. The cantatas were written in 1908-09, when Carl Nielsen was in one of his most productive phases. They have been performed several times since, but it is only in connection with the new collected edition of Nielsen’s works that they have appeared in print. The same is true of his genial Homage to Holberg, written in 1923 to celebrate the great 18th-century dramatist to whom Carl Nielsen also paid homage with his opera Maskarade.

Very few composers have been able - or willing - to abstain from writing at least some of their music to order. Carl Nielsen (1865-1931), whom the Danes often refer to as their national composer, was no ex-ception. Through-out his career he wrote works at the behest of others, and many of them were commissioned for a par-ticular occasion. The occasion could be unique, as was the case with three of the four compositions on this cd, or recurrent, as was the case with the Cantata for the annual university commemoration.

The most extensive of these occasional works is the Cantata for the opening ceremony of the 1909 national exhibition in Aarhus. Composing it was a task so formidable that Nielsen at first declined it. A libretto had been outlined by the writer L.C. Nielsen, whom Carl Nielsen knew quite well, having not long before writ-ten some of the incidental music for L.C. Nielsen's play Willemoes.\\ It was the playwright who suggested to the mayor of Århus, E. C. L. Drechsel, that he should commission the music for the cantata from Carl Nielsen. In the spring of 1908 \\Willemoes\\ had enjoyed a run of 31 performances at the Folk Theatre in Copenhagen and 12 performances at Aarhus Theatre, and the music had played no little part in its success.

The offer of this commission arrived at a time when Carl Nielsen was already hard at work on another of the pieces recorded here (the university cantata). He also had reservations about the project as such, and in a letter to L.C. Nielsen of 13 July 1908 he accordingly refused the invitation in rather blunt language: \\I do not want to be involved in any of the customary palaver with luncheon, cheering, a cantata, noisy machinery and whinnying horses; there is a time and a place for everything, and I cannot really imagine that the good citizens of Århus will be able to think up anything better than the usual rubbish.\\

L.C. Nielsen did not want to miss an opportunity and on Carl Nielsen's advice he now approached another composer, Fini Henriques, who however also refused. Eventually Carl Nielsen changed his mind and said yes in September; the following month the two Nielsens visited Århus to seek inspiration and to inspect the layout of the actual exhibition site on the coast (the area where Tangkrogen Beach Park lies today). Here no fewer than 1850 exhibitors were to display their products in a series of newly built pavilions designed by some of Denmark's leading architects.

When L.C. Nielsen began to deliver longer and longer text instalments in the course of November, the composer got cold feet again. But a compromise was found whereby his young pupil Emilius Bangert (1883-1962), who had also contributed to the incidental music for \\Willemoes,\\ assumed responsibility for a part of the new cantata under his teacher's supervision.

Nielsen and Bangert shared the work in such a way that Nielsen undertook to write three whole movements (nos. 1, 5 and 6) and Bangert three more (nos. 2, 3 and 7). Only one movement was divided between them - no. 4, of which Nielsen wrote the first 117 bars while Bangert continued from bar 118 (from \\The moment is near\\ in the libretto). At the first performance a short passage for women's choir was, however, omitted between the baritone solo and the following full chorus in Bangert's section of this movement. Though the material for the omitted passage is extant it is not included on this disc.

The exhibition opened in pouring rain but in the presence of the whole royal family on 18 May 1909. The organist of Aarhus Cathedral, Arthur Allin, had rehearsed the 150 strong choir, which was recruited from five local amateur choirs, while the orchestra was professional and probably consisted of musicians from the Aarhus Municipal Orchestra and the Gothenburg Orchestral Society; the latter was on a visit to Århus at the time. Carl Nielsen conducted in person. His soloists were the opera singer Johanne Krarup-Hansen and the local military doctor Grønlund, who was a competent baritone. The reciter was the actor August Liebman, who like the soprano soloist worked at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, where Nielsen currently held the tenured position of conductor.

A modern evaluation of the musical result, applying also to the University cantata, must take account of the fact that these works were not conceived as continuous wholes. In Århus the good Mayor Dreschel held quite a long speech between nos. 2 and 3, praising Danish industry, commerce and (to a lesser extent) culture, and King Frederik VIII opened the exhibition with a few pithy remarks preceding the last move-ment, no. 7, which therefore had the character of a fanfare.

The event was covered by numerous newspapers, including newspapers from the capital, and it is curious that none of them saw fit to mention Bangert at all, in spite of the fact that his share of the work was clearly specified in the printed programme. Nielsen was the recipient of such compliments as were forthcoming, and the reason is perhaps not just that he was much better known, but also that he and his rather unequal collaborator achieved a remarkable degree of stylistic uniformity. If we were to point out weak-nesses in the work, the present writer would be inclined to criticise Nielsen for failing to create even a minimum of variety in the rather lengthy opening number with its banal, self-congratulatory atmosphere. Admittedly he got little or no help from his librettist.

If the opening of the Århus exhibition was thus to some extent a success in spite of itself, no one could call the rest of it a fiasco. Before the event closed at the beginning of October it had been visited by no fewer than 667,000 people and had earned itself the local nickname of \\the Universal Exhibition.\\

The cantata in fact managed to get performed a second time under the auspices of the Danish Concert Society, which felt that it deserved to be heard in Copenhagen as well. It was performed at a concert on 25 April 1910 with Victor Bendix as conductor and with the librettist's wife, Margrethe L.C. Nielsen, as so-pra-no soloist. This time Bangert received his share of praise and blame.

As already mentioned, the Cantata for the annual university commemoration, written in 1908, occupies a special place among Nielsen's cantatas in having been written for a recurrent occasion. Formerly the uni-versity had held several celebrations in the course of the year, but now it was thought desirable to combine them all into a single so-called Annual Festival with more or less fixed ceremonial. In May 1906 the structure of the new event was approved and a Cantata Committee was appointed. The new order of ceremonies was tried out in November the same year, though a new cantata could not be ready in time; accordingly J. P. E. Hartmann's Cantata for the commemoration of the fourth centenary of the university from 1879 was revived instead.

The learned gentlemen in the Cantata Committee decided in the first instance to commission a new libretto from the author Niels Møller (1859-1941), who combined a job as head of department in the National Life Insurance Agency with writing and teaching. In poetic, though not always idiomatic, language the text describes the evolution of intellectual life from the childhood of mankind to what was then the present day. When the committee had approved the text in November 1907, they approached Carl Nielsen to set it to music and invited him to attend the festival a week later. That year it was C.E.F. Weyse's old Refor-mation cantata from 1817 which was interpolated into the new ceremonies.

Nielsen was to deliver the piece in time for the festival in November 1908. He succeeded in meeting this deadline, though as was so often the case he only did so by the skin of his teeth. He had not really set to work until the beginning of July, when he sat down to compose in the beautiful surroundings of the ‘Damgaard', idyllically situated near the Little Belt. A week later he could reassure Niels Møller that he was making pro-gress: \\Today I skipped ahead and diverted myself by writing the melody for the concluding song, which in a way I have been a little nervous about the whole time, for it is more by luck than good guidance that a song like that turns out as it should, i.e. catchy, unmistakable and nevertheless with a certain grandiosity.\\

The commission stipulated some formal requirements: Part One of the cantata (nos. 1 and 2) was to be followed by a special lecture, and between Part Two (no. 3) and the final part (no. 4) there would be ceremonies such as the accession of a new rector or new deans of faculties, conferral of degrees and such-like. But there were also some musical requirements. The Student Singers (a male voice ensemble) were to participate, and all the performers had to be accommodated in the gallery of the main auditorium of the university, which excluded the possibility of a large orchestra. Nielsen therefore chose to write for an orchestra consisting of strings and relatively few wind instru-ments, but with the addition of a piano which could be used to accompany the handful of recitatives. He had little experience of incorporating a piano in a larger instrumental constellation, but in fact he succeeded quite well in making it sound natural. In the instrumentation he tried to mirror the libretto's exposition of the development of science from prim-eval darkness to the enlightened present, beginning darkly and trying to conclude as lightly as possible.

The first performance was given at the annual festival on 29 October 1908 under the direction of Salo-mon Levysohn, the regular conductor of the Student Singers. Nielsen had been present to give advice during re-hearsals. The soloists were the soprano Emilie Ulrich, the tenor Olaf Holbøll and the bass baritone Helge Nissen, and the royal family was again in attendance. The press was on the whole kind to Nielsen, but very critical of Niels Møller's libretto which The Christian Daily, for instance, called \\Darwinistic evolu-tio-nary ob-scu-rantism.\\

Now followed an episode which did not exactly reflect favourably on the learned members of the Cantata Com-mittee. Their chairman, Professor Franz Buhl, wrote to Nielsen that the libretto \\[had] not been greeted with great enthusiasm at the university either.\\ Nielsen, who probably with good reason was afraid that the cantata might be shelved, replied that he found it hard to understand how they could first approve a libretto, then reject it and in the meantime let him expend so much effort on setting it to music. After several meetings of the Consistory Court the whole affair ended in a compromise: Niels Møller made some minor text alterations in Part One, no. 2, and Part Two, no. 3, suppressing the mention of heathen sun--worship, the descent of man from the animals, and the strained relationship between science and the ecclesiastical authorities of former times. Nielsen changed the score where the revised verses no longer fitted, and in its new form the cantata was premiered at the annual festival in 1910.

In this form the cantata (whether the whole work or just extracts) has been performed quite often at the annual festival, and it is the revised version which has now been published in the Carl Nielsen Edition and is recorded here. But there was one thing which neither the librettist nor the composer could do anything about: because of its text the Student Singers at once dubbed the piece \\The volvulus cantata,\\ and that nickname has lived on.

1916 was the third centenary of the death of Shakespeare, and to mark the occasion the Society of Danish Authors arranged an open-air performance at Kronborg Castle. The main ingredient in the programme was a shortened version of \\Ham-let,\\ beginning with a Prologue written by Helge Rode (1870-1923) for which Carl Nielsen was asked to compose the music. He used three solo singers, mixed choir and orchestra and also personally conducted the first performance, which took place at Kronborg on 24 June. This was two days later than planned because of the unpredictable Danish summer weather.

Later in the year one number from this occasional piece, Ariel's Song, was published separately with piano accompaniment. It survived on the concert platform both in this arrangement and with the original orchestral accompaniment. Thus the tenor Anders Brems, who had appeared in the premiere at Kronborg, later sang the orchestral version in Stockholm and Copenhagen - again with local orchestral forces conduc-ted by the composer.

The year 1923 saw another centenary celebration, in this case the two hundredth anniversary of the first performance of a play in the Danish language. The Royal Theatre naturally wanted to honour Ludvig Hol-berg, the most important figure in this chapter of the history of the Danish stage, and the highlight of the anniversary programme was to be a special performance of his comedy \\The political tinker\\ exactly two hundred years after its premiere. The evening was to conclude with an epilogue written by the poet Hans Hartvig Seedorff Pedersen (1892-1986).

Pedersen's playlet in verse was entitled \\Homage to Holberg.\\ Since Carl Nielsen had set a Holberg comedy to music not quite twenty years earlier, and this opera (\\Masquerade\\) continued to occupy a pro-minent place in the repertoire of the Royal Theatre, the choice of composer was fairly obvious. Admittedly the invitation only reached Nielsen in the middle of August, but with a deadline of 1 September. Though again on vacation at Damgaard, he immediately fell for the idea. He wrote to his wife, who was then in Copenhagen: \\It is of course, as you say, in fact a shame that this music is only for this particular occasion; but it is constructed in such a fashion that it can be performed repeatedly and in other circumstances. Anyway, perhaps it has some deeper meaning that one has to do one's best even when the challenge is not so great, and I can claim to have done just that. Holberg is also one of my favourite authors, not only for his comedies but when he is writing in a serious vein as well.\\

In addition to the four women opera singers who played the muses in the introduction, the anniversary performance featured a veritable galaxy of the theatre's actors and actresses. They appeared as well-known Holberg figures, taking turns to salute a statue of the author placed in a golden cage at the back of the stage. Famous names who made appearances were Poul Reumert as Henrik and Johannes Poulsen as Jean de France; Bodil Ipsen played Pernille, who carried a rod symbolising Holberg's satire.

The music points back in the direction of the Nielsen we know from the third act of \\Masquerade.\\ It bears very little trace of the composer who had recently written his revolutionary Fifth Symphony. All the same (or perhaps for that very reason!) the anniversary piece was greeted with general goodwill. It was, however, never played again except for a single reprise a few days later. So it is good that we at last have a recording enabling us to create an opportunity for ourselves - one which the Royal Theatre has apparently not enjoyed since the far-off days of 1923.